Judged against the Hitman series, namely Blood Money, it's disappointing. They messed with established mechanics like the disguise system, and overall the game is more linear and the sandboxes are smaller.

Judged against the Hitman series, namely Blood Money, it's disappointing. They messed with established mechanics like the disguise system, and overall the game is more linear and the sandboxes are smaller.

Compared against the stealth genre, it's not bad.

Blood money was bad but 2 is one of the best stealth games of all time. I'm buying this regardless, I'm a fan of Hitman and it's something to tide me over after I finish AC3.

How did they change the disguise system? That's always been a key part of the Hitman games.

Now when you take a disguise, everyone else wearing that outfit scrutinizes you. The problem is that their range of detecting you as a fraud is far too large.

In reality, it makes sense. If I steal a cop's outfit and try to blend in with a handful of cops, they might see through me. But what happens in the game is that you're often in large crowds, or far away from anyone that could see through your disguise, yet you're attracting their attention.

I don't mind that they made it more realistic and more difficult to use, but don't give the ai a hive mind and a sixth sense to see through my disguise. They went too far in one direction.

EDIT: I should point out that it doesn't ruin the game, it just makes sections unnecessarily frustrating due to forcing trial and error gameplay.

I recommend backing up your save if possible, at least in regards to the 360 version. I got a hard lock during a loading screen and lost 3 or 4 hours of progress, and just now I would've lost another save had I not backed up. Looking online, it's not common, but it is happening to other people.

PC port is bad with controls that tell you to "gently" press LMB. Performance is 15~fps on 2/3 review machines

No saving discourages exploration

Weapons do not carry over across missions

AI is bad

Game encourages you to kill guards, unlike other Hitman games

Most assassinations are cutscenes and in a lot of them 47 fails to kill the target, rendering all of your work pointless

Contracts mode is pretty decent

Currently, though, Absolution is not worth buying. If they can somehow patch in a save function, improve performance, and let players do interesting things with Contracts, it will be. Until then, I'd wait for a preposterous Steam sale.

That's something I never thought I'd have to say about a Hitman game. I desperately hope the reaction to it is strong enough to convince the developers to change direction, because I couldn't stand to watch the series die like this.